For the purpose of finishing and decorating building, tapestry has been suggested which, unlike the old tapesty of paper or textile material, consists of a support of paper or conventional textile material covered by a decorative layer applied in the form of a paste. The paste consists of various binders and filling material, made of natural or artificial matter, ground to a fine grain size or to dust and applied by means of simple rakes or of special brushes. Due to the dusty character of the filler, these layers have not succeeded in assuming the decorative aspect of the natural materials from which the dusty filler was derived. That is why recently prefabricated finishing materials in the shape of flexible foils and plates have been proposed, these comprising a support of textile or of glass felt, covered by a layer of plaster made of a binder of synthetic resins and small or larger granules, in narrow dimensional ranges, applied mechanically. To fix the foil, the back side of the support is covered with a layer of "fillerized" binder, which is attached to the components of the building by means of a cement mortar, with an addition of binders of polymers, emulsifiable in water. The face layer of the sheet of material is opacified, and does not show clearly the grains; the structure and the visual aspects of the natural materials employed for the paste are greatly modified. Moreover, the paste or the mortar require large quantities of binder, thereby making for high prices.
During the last two decades many other prefabricated dry materials have been suggested for the finishing and decoration of buildings. Material consisting of a sheet of elastomer, with expanding additives, covered by a wearable layer of rubber, colored or possibly offset, treated in a furnace for the purpose of expanding or of vulcanizing the wearable layer, which is a material of poor decorative effect and may be practically employed only for flooring. In a similar material, the lower layer consists of expanded plastics. Another material suggested applies on a carrying layer made of jute or sewn felt, a layer of expanded polyvinyl chloride and over it a thin wearable layer of polyvinyl chloride, colored or slightly embossed. All these materials, which may be used indoors, especially for flooring, consist essentially of plastics and have the artificial appearance of the latter.
Instead of the old and new types of mosaic for floors and walls, attached manually, at high costs, from bigger or smaller flat parts (the so-called "Kleinmosaik"), fixed by means of wet mortar, finishings and decorations made of mosaic foils, have been suggested, with small bits of artificial stones, glass, metal, ceramics, plastics, prefabricated foils, flexible and dry. They consist of a layer of flat components of the same or different kind, color, etc., fixed together by filling the space between them and by means of a connecting layer made of thermoplastic polymers, attached to a support of asbestos felt, impregnated with a thermoplastic polymer, plastified and fillerized. For fastening, thermoplastic polymers and copolymers of polyvinyl chloride are employed, as well as mixtures of the above; the impregnation is performed with acrylic polymer with additives.
A material suggested for finishing and for decoration, as an artificial stone, consists of a relatively thin support sheet of nonhardened synthetic resin, into which larger granules (bits) of crushed rock are partially thrust; the support is then hardened and fixes the granules, which are ground with flat facettes, partially or down to the support level; in one version, the spaces between the large granules are filled with smaller granules, in the form of a paste with binder of synthetic resin or an inorganic one, the whole surface being then ground, flat or corrugated, after hardening; in another version, the support is translucent, of adequate thickness and has larger granules thrust in it so that the foil may be applied with either face towards the support, the granules being visible, either directly or by transparence. The foils have the appearance of artificial material deriving from the visible support or plastic binder, and are rather expensive, due both to the basic materials which are used and the high production costs.